Benjamin Franklin once said, โFor every minute spent organising, an hour is earned.โ The clinical operations function of a company is all about organisation, and optimising this function is key to the delivery of clinical trials โ without this team no clinical research activity could be delivered. There are more than 300,000 clinical trials ongoing worldwide at any time, so effective clinical operations could save a lot of time and money in the drug development process.
Clinical trials are a necessity for the treatment, diagnosis and prevention of diseases, but recruiting patients to conduct them can prove to be a challenge for clinical operations teams. A quantitative study conducted by Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development found that 11% of investigative sites failed to enrol a single patient. In a way to combat this, clinical operations teams are turning to social media to recruit patients for their trials. The study by Tufts brought together a group of 20 pharmaceutical companies including Lilly, Pfizer and Novartis. They have already piloted or tapped into social media with good results, with the report finding the number of patients being recruited on social media is increasing by 11%, year on year.
The payoff to a career in clinical operations is, of course, the satisfaction that comes with being involved in potentially lifesaving research, and enticingly most people working in clinical operations are usually paid excellent remunerations due to the importance of their role and the responsibility it carries. Clinical operations is an in-demand specialty, the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that jobs are expected to grow much faster than sector average, at 17%, by 2024.
